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Progress Is Reported in Arms Talks With Russia

MOSCOW — Russian and American officials on Thursday reported progress in discussions about nuclear weapons reductions, in a sign that renewed cooperation may be under way just days after the United States canceled part of a Europe-based missile defense program that had infuriated the Kremlin.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagelannounced the cancellation of the final stage of the Europe-based missile shield program last week as part of a plan to contain a rising threat from North Korea by shifting missile interceptors to the West Coast and Alaska.

The Pentagon said that Russia had not been a factor in the decision, but senior administration officials acknowledged that the move could ease tensions with Russian officials and potentially represent a breakthrough after months of deteriorating relations.

After meetings in Geneva on Tuesday and Wednesday, Rose Gottemoeller, the acting under secretary of state for arms control, and Sergei Ryabkov, a Russian deputy foreign minister, each issued positive comments, indicating that the two sides had renewed active talks on nonproliferation efforts, which had been largely stalled for months.

Mr. Ryabkov was more expansive at a news conference Thursday upon his return to Moscow, where he announced that the dialogue had improved. “Rose Gottemoeller and I share the opinion that there is progress in the negotiations,” he said, according to Russian news agencies.

“We have planned new contacts at various levels for the coming period,” he said. “Intensity of these contacts is not declining but in fact increasing, which shows that the work is moving ahead vigorously.” But he also cautioned that no new agreements had been reached or were even yet on the table.

Russia had expressed repeated objections to the final phase of the Europe-based missile program, which the United States said was entirely directed at Iran. That phase of the project, which military experts said was based on technology that did not yet exist and might never work, was aimed at the potential interception of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Iran is generally believed to be years away from developing such missiles, although Russia has many of them, which provided a basis for the Kremlin’s complaints that the system could be used against Russia. American officials called the objections exaggerated and unrealistic.

Still, the dispute had largely brought a halt to cooperative efforts on arms reductions, including future cuts in the two countries’ nuclear arsenals, which Mr. Obama has identified as a priority for his second term.

Senior Russian officials had pressed him personally about the issue on several occasions. At one such meeting, in South Korea in March 2012, Mr. Obama was overhead on an open microphone privately telling Dmitri A. Medvedev, then the Russian president, that he would have “more flexibility” after the American presidential election.

Some United States officials seemed to have been counting on expected budget cuts at the Pentagon to force changes in the missile program and perhaps alleviate the Russian objections.

The Kremlin said last fall that it did not want to renew a longstanding joint effort to dismantle nuclear, chemical and other nonconventional weapons known as the Nunn-Lugar agreement.

The talks in Geneva were apparently aimed at potentially continuing some of those efforts. But Mr. Obama’s main priority seems to be arsenal reductions beyond what was called for in the New Start Treaty, which was agreed to in 2010. Russia had indicated that it had no interest in discussing further cuts until the missile defense issue was resolved.

The Kremlin had initially remained silent after Mr. Hagel’s announcement, as Russian officials had not been briefed ahead of time. Mr. Ryabkov, at his news conference, said that the cancellation of the final stage of the program seemed to show the United States as “making some practical efforts” to continue dialogue.

A version of this article appears in print on March 22, 2013, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Progress Is Reported In Arms Talks With Russia. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe